Trademarks + Brands by Corsearch

Corsearch is proud to announce that our General Counsel and Privacy Officer, Diane Plaut, has been chosen to be one of the two individuals to represent the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) of ICANN to determine the future of WHOIS.

As we hit the halfway mark in 2018, it's a good time to note that sweeping changes to Canada's trademark law are expected to come into force early in 2019. Amendments to the "Trade-marks Act" include:

• A date of first use will no longer be required.
• The definition of a trademark will be broadened to include nontraditional items like smells, tastes, textures, and moving images.
• Dividing trademark applications will be permitted.
• A Declaration of Use will no longer be required.
• The registration term will be change from 15 years to 10 years.
• Canada will become a member of the Madrid Protocol and adopt the Nice Classification of goods and services.
• Third party correspondence (i.e, Letters of Protest) will be permitted during prosecution. 
• The government registration fee will be eliminated.
• Registration fees for every classification will be introduced. 

US-based domain name and internet security company Verisign released its Q1 2018 report, "The Domain Name Industry Brief," which highlights trends in domain name registrations and includes key performance indicators.

Overall,domain name registrations are growing by approximately 3.2 million, or 1%, year over year. Check out these other interesting stats from the Q1 report:

Renaming a brand, a product, or a company is a huge, complex project. Have you ever thought about what happens when a country undergoes a name change?

The African nation of Swaziland is doing just that. It was announced in April that Swaziland was changing its name to "eSwatini," which means "home of the Swazi people." The new name eSwatini isn't completely "new" — a lot of the residents already use it locally — but the renaming announcement made by the country's King Mswati III on his 50th birthday, during the country's celebrations marking 50 years of independence from Great Britain,reportedly caught many citizens by surprise.

According to an AFP news agency report, the king said: "African countries on getting independence reverted to their ancient names before they were colonized. So from now on the country will be officially be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini." He also cited another reason for the name change: "Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland."